Venus: The Jungle Planet--Part 1

Before the Solar System turned out to be boring in real life, Venus was often portrayed as a jungle planet, on the persumption that its perpetual cloud cover trapped in heat and kept the temperature at tropical levels. Often, dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures roamed the Venusian jungle.

"Swamp Girl of Venus" was set on such a planet. Publsihed in the September 1949 issue of Amazing Stories, it was written by Robert Moore Willams under the pen name H. H. Harmon.

It's a fun story, jumping into the action right from the start when human trader Hal McCabe rescues a Venusian native named Juth, who is being tortured for information about the location of Coth, a land inhabited by people who fly large, visious bird creatures. The torturers know that Coth is rumored to be rich in gold, so they want to know how to get there.

 McCabe puts a stop to the torture and also exacts a little bit of ironic justice on the bad guys. But McCabe and his new friend are soon in trouble. The inhabitants of Coth, riding down on their fifel (Venusian for "flying death") attack, knocking them out with gas bombs.

They wake up in a dungeon, stripped naked and knowing that their captors intend to hunt them for sport. But a story set on a Venusian jungle planet can rarely progress far without  a pretty human girl showing up. In this case, the girl is Le-ann. Her father was also an Earth trader, but his space ship had crashed in the nearby swamps when she was just 12 years old. Her dad was killed and she's been living with the people of Coth ever since. She's recently found her dad's ship, but doesn't understand that it will no longer fly.

So when she springs McCabe and Juth from the slammer, they end up in a wrecked ship that is leaking radiation, surrounded by dinosaurs and a variety of other dangerous fauna.

Walking across a Venusian swamp is a quick way to commit suicide, so the only option seems to be for them to steal some fifel and make an escape by air. Whether McCabe can Juth can both manage to fly the foul-tempered beasts or win the inevitable dogfight against a horde of Coth warriors is an open question. But when your only option is your only option, you gotta go for it.

"Swamp Girl of Venus" is a fun piece of Space Opera. Williams does a nice bit of world-building and the final airborne chase/fight scene is well-choreographed and exciting. McCabe is pretty much an straight-out-of-the-box tough-guy action hero ("No one had ever accused Hal McCabe of having lace on the edge of his underpants."), but he's a likeable hero and gets a nice human moment when he is almost crippled with embarassement when he meet Le-ann right after being stripped of all his clothes.

You can read it online HERE.

Next week, we'll look at another author's version of Venus as a jungle planet.